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Hubbell, Sue ListingsIf you cannot find what you want on this page, then please use our search feature to search all our listings. Click on Title to view full description
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WAITING FOR APHRODITE: JOURNEYS INTO THE TIME BEFORE BONES
Hubbell, Sue
1999 20163 When Sue Hubbell moved from her longtime home on a farm in Missouri to a house perched on the rocky coast of Maine, the first thing she did was investigate the living things in her new environment to ease the loneliness of a new place. She peered under rocks, in dark crevices, and beneath mounds of leaves, looking for members of nature's secretive ruling class--the invertebrates. In Waiting for Aphrodite, Hubbell first trains her microscopic gaze on camel crickets--"They grew a bright orange bump on the back of what we would like to call their necks but mustn't, because bugs don't have necks"--and sea cucumbers--"cool and leathery and limp, a little like a damp, deflated football." From there, she continues her tour with millipedes, sponges, periwinkles, corals, earthworms, horseshoe crabs, and other underappreciated earth-dwellers, describing each species in lushly metaphoric prose and a perfectly appropriate sense of wonder. These are strange beasts, and their ways are mysterious. Yet Hubbell seeks, and finds, common ground between invertebrates and humans. She writes that the first useful behavioral mandate for isopods such as pill bugs is "Walk toward shelter," a rule that applies easily to vulnerable humans as well. The thing that binds all animals is the constant search for the necessities of life. And for Hubbell, a sense of place and knowledge of her neighbors is as crucial as food or shelter. Hence the heart of the book--her search for a glimpse of the elusive sea mouse, Aphrodite aculeata, a small, soft-bodied sea creature with a velvety, iridescent coat. While waiting for Aphrodite, she finds gorgeous bits of life all around her and begins to feel at home. --Therese Littleton From Booklist Hubbell is a sunny naturalist who writes stimulating prose. Her newest book, a sibling to her eye-opening Broadsides from the Other Order: A Book of Bugs (1993), is a free-roaming survey of the busy lives of invertebrates: "small animals that creep and jump and slither and flutter." More than 95 percent of Earth's animals fall into this immense and spectacularly diverse category, and Hubbell deftly conveys her fascination with some of its more curious representatives. Most of the creatures she portrays are found in environs she has called home (the Ozarks and the coast of Maine), but she reports, too, from further afield, most strikingly Belize's coral reefs. As philosophical as she is descriptive, Hubbell introduces the modest but sensitive pill bug, gives her readers the creeps by chronicling massive invasions of millipedes, and muses on the essentiality of invertebrates, who are perpetually "tidying up the world." Sponges, earthworms, bees, spiders, horseshoe crabs, and Aphrodite, the elusive, wormlike sea mouse, all engage Hubbell's astute attention and fluid sense of wonder. Houghton Mifflin 0395837030 / 9780395837030
Hardcover As New Condition Boston
Price:
19.11 USD
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